Roman Polanski: 'Everyone else fancies little girls too'

By Michael Deacon

Having blogged about Roman Polanski’s arrest, I reread an extraordinary interview Polanski gave to the novelist Martin Amis in 1979, the year after Polanski went on the run.
The interview originally appeared in Tatler and is collected in Amis’s excellent book Visiting Mrs Nabokov.
Here’s a section of the first quote it contains from Polanski.
“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
Thirty years have passed since Polanski said those words, so he’s had time to reconsider them. Whether he’s actually done so, we don’t yet know. Perhaps he still thinks it’s true that everyone fancies little girls, and that the press was exaggerating the enormity of his crime, and that all this somehow excuses his behaviour.
Later in the interview, Polanski says he likes Paris, to which he’d fled, because it’s “very grown-up”.
Unlike the 13-year-old girl with whom he admitted having unlawful sex.